THE BLACKBOARD BURNOUTS WHEN THE TEACHER OF THE YEAR IS HUSTLING REAL ESTATE AND THE COACH OF THE YEAR IS SELLING INSURANCE, WHO'S MINDING THE SCHOOL?

When does it happen? When do the rewards and gratification become insufficient, when does the finely calibrated inner eye of ambition begin to corrode and weaken?

Most teachers go into the profession out of idealism. The hours are long but you don't mind; you feel you can make a difference. Some of the kids are great and some of the kids call to get bailed out of jail, but they all need you.

You hurt for them when their parents split up or there's trouble in the house. You know what's happening even without being told because their grades dip. It's infallible.

The years creep up. In the back of your mind, you thought it would get easier after a while, but it never does.

For some teachers, it is a slow accretion; too many classes, too many students, too many parents who want you to fill every void that they and society have created in the child.

For others, it comes with a sudden heave, a lightning slash of enlightenment, bold and a little scary.

A teacher is telling about how it happened to him, about how this kid was giving him an increasingly hard time in his class. All the usual things were tried -- the principal's office, detentions -- but the disruptions continued until finally the teacher called the kid's mother.

The problem was explained at some length, the mother listening quietly. Finally, the teacher said that the problem seemed to be, ultimately, one of respect. The kid's mother finally opened her mouth. "But why should my child respect you," she said, "when you only make $15,000 a year?"

So there it was, right out in the open, the ultimate American truth that only someone very honest or very stupid would actually give voice to: You are what you earn. No less and certainly no more.

SOL ABOULAFIA -- the name is Sephardic -- was Broward County's Teacher of the Year in 1983, admired by his co-workers and students at Coral Ridge High, profiled on The CBS Evening News. It was, he shyly admits, like getting an Oscar for a performance that wasn't really his best. Actually, the year before that was the best one. The one after the award was good too, even though there were one or two classes that weren't quite up to snuff.

Then, a year later, he quit the profession he had followed for nearly 20 years.

"When I went into it, it was exciting," he says. "I worked my butt off; I taught extra classes for extra money, I taught summer school. I spent every single night grading papers. On weekends I took kids to science competitions. It was a proud thing to be a teacher. Now, it's something to apologize for."

There is no anger, little frustration, and almost no cataloguing of grievances in his voice as he talks, just a kind of sublimated sorrow.

In Broward County, the ninth largest school district in the nation, teacher turnover -- which includes retirement and non-renewed contracts as well as resignations -- totals about 8 percent annually of the county's 6,600 teachers, down slightly from more than 9 percent four years ago. For Palm Beach County's 4,200 teachers, the turnover is nearly 8.5 percent. Outside of math, science and English, teaching jobs are hard to come by, and are not casually abandoned. Most teachers are staying on the job, but with feelings of exhaustion and anger. And, clearly, some of the best ones are leaving.

TAKE ROBBIE ROBINSON, who taught physical education and coached the football team at Santaluces High in Lantana. In three years, he took his team from 0-10 to 8-4, winning conference Coach of the Year awards from all the newspapers. In June, he quit his teaching job to sell insurance for State Mutual Life.

"My priorities changed," explains the handsome Robinson, a boy-next-door type in his middle '30s with the inverted pyramid torso of a natural athlete.

"It gets scary; you see 55- year-old coaches driving a ratty old car and trying to make ends meet. I've got three daughters, you know? The friends I grew up with are all very successful lawyers or doctors or businessmen. After a while you begin to wonder. If the pay was there, it'd be different, but . . ."

Robinson explains that, while pay has generally been boosted, it was boosted at the low end. "A guy who just started teaching my last year was making only $3,000 less than I was after 11 years. What can I say?"

THE SAME COMPLAINTS occur time and again among disaffected professionals who either have left or are thinking of leaving their chosen profession. Ironically, the bulk of the complaints may have been brought on by a long- awaited upgrading of Florida's under-financed educational system. Recently instituted programs like standardized curriculum and the merit pay program for teachers are being attacked bitterly. In the first instance, their critics claim, they are catering to the lowest common denominator; and in the second, they are creating feelings of envy and unhealthy competition in a field that is supposed to foster the love of learning for its own sake.

Dr. Mary Gray is assistant professor of education at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, a leading teachers' college. She is a supporter of the current system, begun two years ago, and, indeed, helped design it.

"People don't understand, so they're fearful," she says. "They're so worried about the borderline cases that might be passed up by the merit program -- the people on the edge of the 25 percent that are gifted teachers -- that it's coloring all their feelings about teaching."

The theory behind unified curriculum that if a student transfers from one school to another, the other school will be using the same book and the teacher will be covering the same material, almost to the day.

"The unified curriculum was meant to solve a problem," explains Gray. "Before, you could move a third grader from the coast to the Glades and not know you were in the same country."

In practice, according to teachers, unified curriculum is pure drudgery, and results in sloughing off difficult material or gifted students. Advanced placement courses are available in the state's course directory, but with money and manpower stretched so tightly, both are placed in the service of the most basic programs.

The state's obsession with making the teacher more accountable and the environment more rigorous has created a bureaucracy within a bureaucracy. The resulting blizzard of paperwork and the subtle air of intimidation has forced many teachers like Angie Matemors, a department head and veteran of 15 years in the teaching trenches, to consider leaving.

"The only bright point of teaching is the kids," she says. "They are the only worthwhile thing in the profession."

Angie Matemors' science program at Coral Ridge High was admittedly rigorous, bringing in Westinghouse Awards for some student projects and $25,000 in scholarships. But at the same time she was accepting the Westinghouse Award in Cincinnati, she knew that her program was about to disappear, eliminated because the state couldn't monitor such unique courses. "They told me that they could only monitor the basic things," she says. "Our program was too way out; nobody else was doing it."

This grind-it-out mentality is cited by teachers all over Broward and Palm Beach. "Striving for excellence has translated to striving for mediocrity," says Ernie Mathews, a world history teacher for 10 years at Forest Hills High school in West Palm Beach. "Parental preference is now dominant over teacher preference. Frankly, morale is blah. The general attitude is, 'Put in the 7 1/ 2 hours, go home and forget it.' "

Sol Aboulafia believes that the unified curriculum program has been a curse for creative teachers in Florida, among whose number he once counted himself.

"What you have now are 67 Florida counties whose educational needs are far from identical -- rural counties have different educational imperatives than urban ones -- and they have all been put on the same level. Advanced programs are going to have to be either abandoned or accordioned, combined and watered down. I don't think education can be standardized on a county level, let alone the state level."

David Smith, head of the Palm Beach teachers union, concurs, saying that the standardized curriculum "has strait-jacketed teachers. Sure, every student needs the basics, but that shouldn't occupy every day of every school year."

In its determination to raise Florida's SAT scores to a respectable level, critics charge, the state is doing nothing more than "teaching for a test rather than for the inculcation of knowledge," as Dave Smith puts it.

Not everyone agrees. "What's wrong with teaching for a test?" responds Mary Gray, the FAU professor. "It isn't all that bad; at least the kids are getting their ABC's. Before, a lot of them were getting through the system without that much."

According to Teacher of the Year Sol Aboulafia, it was not the kids nor the administration of Coral Ridge High that caused him to quit and go to work for Coral Ridge Properties, but rather the policies handed down by Tallahassee as if they were Papal Bulls. He was hitting 40, and he asked himself if what he was doing was sufficiently satisfying to keep doing it for the next 25 years. The answer was obvious.

Aboulafia's decision to quit was made easier by the fact that he was passed over by the state's merit pay program because he didn't have a master's degree, a qualification that has since been deleted.

"I was upset, yes. The degree wouldn't have changed a thing about the way I taught. There was also the fact that evaluations were being done by administrators who weren't qualified to judge the caliber of a teacher.

"The funny thing was, I thought I would get nostalgic, I thought I would miss teaching terribly. But I didn't; if it hadn't been for my twin boys starting up last September, I don't think it would ever have occurred to me that I was missing the beginning of the school year for the first time in nearly 20 years."

THE REALITY of anybody's educational experience is of three or four genuinely fine, gifted teachers surrounded by several dozen faceless drones and a few classic burn-outs who were punching in and punching out. (How can you tell a burnt-out teacher? Easy: One who just doesn't give a damn, who'd just as soon show a movie as work with the class.)

The merit pay program is, in intent, an effort to to reward teachers in the same way that universities and private industry does: by giving bonuses for jobs well done.

There are two steps toward qualifying as a merit teacher. First is a written test that measures competence in a given field, not the material that the teacher actually deals with, but material years in advance of what is taught. The test is rigorous, say people who have taken it, and Mary Gray explains that teachers without a broad knowledge of their subject beyond their immediate material are likely to be vague because of a lack of a broad overview.

The second part is more subjective and involves several classroom observations by a team of state-certified administrators. Once certified, so- called master teachers receive a lump payment of $3,000 the first year, and, upon verification by the school principal of continued satisfactory performance, $3,000 bonuses for each of the succeeding two years.

Mary Gray says that the reason the teachers' unions don't like the master teacher program is because they involve funds that the unions didn't have to negotiate for. "They resent that," she says.

Teachers' complaints about the merit pay program center around the class observation part of the judging. "For instance, to score well in the discipline section," says Coral Ridge High's Angie Matemors, "there has to be an incident and you have to handle it correctly. If there is no discipline problem during the observation portion of the test, you lose out. It's skewed towards teachers in lower socio-economic areas, where there are more disruptions."

Operating on the presumption that one should be wary of any award which makes its winners uneasy, listen to Harriett Schilit, a merit teacher at Carver Middle School in Delray Beach, one of 55 merit teachers in Palm Beach county, one of 2,000 across the state:

"I'm not taking a great deal of pleasure in being a merit teacher. It had the potential to bring a great deal of satisfaction, but I have tended not to discuss it. I met the criteria; whether those criteria were the best possible ones is something else again.

"There were just a lot of very good teachers who didn't qualify, and it has to undermine you when you know you're good, your peers know you're good, and you're overlooked. The program needs to be fine-tuned."

OVER AND ABOVE judgment problems, there remains the question of attracting top talent into the education field. Why should someone go through four rigorous years of college, and accept a highly stressful, often exhausting job for which they will be reimbursed to the tune of $16,000. Reality dictates other career choices.

"The people we're getting into the profession now are from the lower quartile of college classes," says Angie Matemors. "They're from places like Mississppi, Alabama and Tennessee. My God, we have to recruit chemistry and physics teachers from Germany! And why not? The way it is now, there's no status, no money and no intrinsic rewards."

If standardized curriculum and the merit pay program aren't the answers, what is?

"I wouldn't touch the curriculum at the high school level," says Ernie Mathews, the West Palm Beachhistory teacher. "I'd work strictly on the elementary level, which are the most important years of a child's schooling. I would drill, drill, drill them on the basic building blocks that they'll need to know. Believe me, you'd be astounded at the number of 9th graders who can't figure out simple fractions."

Sol Aboulafia suggests a hardening of the certification process. "If no teacher can handle a class that he is not specifically certified to teach, which happens everywhere, we would lose 1/3 of our teachers. That would create a critical shortage, and supply and demand would come into it. Teachers would become a valued commodity."

Ultimately, all that will make a difference in the educational system is either a radical increase in the pay scale or wholesale alterations in the American value system. Neither seems imminent.

Sol Aboulafia looks at himself on the TV monitor as he was two years ago: being profiled on the CBS Evening News, teaching, with curly hair "They took it all away," he mumbles at the screen, "they took all the incentives away. I just couldn't do a half-assed job and I could see that's all they really needed. So I left.

"There's so many things we should be doing; we should be following the Japanese system -- 8 or 9 hours every day. School should be the most important thing in a child's life, and if they can't hack it academically, then slide them into a tech school. Of course, in Japan teachers are held in high esteem, like physicians."

On the screen, Aboulafia is smiling, laughing as he puts marshmallows in a vacuum and watches them enlarge. The kids are laughing too, as they grasp a primary law of physics.

"You know, out of 400 people in my high school graduating class, 50 wanted to be teachers? Go around to a high school now; find out if 50 out of every 400 kids want to be teachers. And why should they? Honestly now, would you teach? Would you?"